Urban Labs
Energy & Environment Lab

The Energy and Environment Lab partners with civic and community leaders to identify, rigorously evaluate, and help scale programs and policies that reduce pollution, conserve limited natural resources, and improve environmental outcomes, while ensuring access to reliable and affordable energy.

Leveraging Data for a Healthier Environment

Cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 percent of all carbon dioxide. Rapid population growth and urbanization around the globe is accompanied by increases in energy and natural resource consumption, making the challenges of ensuring access to clean water, clean air, and clean energy especially urgent issues for cities. At the same time, cities have the opportunity to be test beds for change in tackling these growing challenges.

The Energy & Environment Lab brings together policymakers, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropists to take a collaborative approach to improving the environment and ensuring access to reliable and affordable energy. We use natural experiments, randomized controlled trials, behavioral economics, and machine learning to help policymakers identify and generate evidence around innovative approaches to their most pressing environmental and energy-related challenges. In addition, we seek to build a portfolio of new knowledge about the key tools that policymakers have to impact environment and energy outcomes: behavior, pricing, and regulation.